My favourite Dickens: Dombey and Son | Books | The Guardian My favourite Dickens: Dombey and Son By John Mullan Friday 23 September 2011 17.50 EDT First published on Friday 23 September 2011 17.50 EDT Close Monthly serial, October 1846-April 1848 "What was a girl to Dombey and Son!" Despite its intransigently masculine title, Dombey and Son is the one Dickens novel apart from Bleak House with a heroine, Florence Dombey. And Florence, made courageous by the death of her mother and the neglect of her proud, rich father, is an altogether sprightlier protagonist than dutiful, grateful Esther Summerson. Mr Dombey, her father, is one of Dickens's emotionally cauterised men of wealth and power, rich in worldly appurtenances and poor in any concession to humanity. He thinks that he sits on top of society, but in fact he understands little about the commercial forces that have made him and will destroy him. The great power in Dombey and Son is that of the railways.

An early chapter gives an unforgettable description of the building of the railway – a kind of "earthquake" that has hit Camden Town. Later chapters reveal a nation transformed by and utterly enamoured of this new power. "There were railway hotels, office-houses, lodging-houses, boarding-houses; railway plans, maps, views … There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in." Trains are crucial to the elaborate plot. Like all great Dickens novels it has really satisfying baddies. Major "Joe" Bagstock, one of those who predates on the loftily oblivious Mr Dombey, is a sinister, blue-faced old soldier with the disconcerting habit of talking of himself in the third person to an invisible confidante. "He's hard-hearted, Sir, is Joe – he's tough, Sir, tough, and de-vilish sly!" Devilishly, he arranges the marriage of Dombey to his rival in hard-grained pride, Edith Granger.

It is a marriage made in hell, and the description of the wedding, like the decription of Paul Dombey's christening earlier, is one of those unforgettably terrible and comic Dickensian set-pieces. The novel's big villain is Dombey's "manager" (and rarely has so much nastiness been coaxed from that word), the "dainty" Mr Carker. Carker, Dombey's "Grand Vizier", has wonderfully white teeth and a smile that never extends beyond his mouth. He is the loyal apparatchik who would love to destroy and replace his master. "His manner towards Mr Dombey was deeply conceived and perfectly expressed. He was familiar with him, in the very extremity of his sense of the distance between them." Those on the lookout for sentimentality will be able to find it, but in fact the novel is remarkable for its attention to failures of feeling. "What do we live for but sympathy!" exclaims the monstrous Mrs Skewton, who pimps her daughter to rich men looking for a trophy wife. Dombey is half-glimpsed in grief after his son's death in childhood, but must dignify his feelings by hating those of others.

Anyone else displaying grief becomes "a bidder against him". Dombey treads proudly towards his doom with the author's unheard warnings ringing in his ears. Dickens is in among his characters, cajoling and admonishing. As ever, he energetically escapes the confines of literary decorum. Dombey and Son has all the satirical indignation of his early fiction – but new shades of darkness and a new narrative complexity. Halfway through his career, it was his first great novel. David Copperfield came next. Dombey and Son | Charles Dickens Info Charles Dickens Info Dombey and Son Dombey and Son Dombey and Son was Dickens’ seventh novel. It was first published in installments that began in 1846 and ran through 1848. Dombey and Son – Dickens’ Life At The Time 1844 – His son Francis Jeffrey (Frank) is born. Dickens and family travel to Italy. Treated Madame de la Rue with mesmerism . 1845 – Alfred , his sixth child, is born. 1846 – Dickens and his family travel to Lausanne, Switzerland. Publication of Dombey and Son begins.

In November the Dickens family leaves Lausanne and travels to Paris. 1847 – In February the Dickens family leaves Paris ahead of schedule and return to England because Charley Dickens has scarlet fever. On April 18 Sydney Dickens is born to Charles and Kate. 1848 – Dickens’ sister, Fanny , dies in September. The Haunted Man, his last Christmas book is published. Theme of Dombey and Son In her book, The Friendly Dickens , Norrie Epstein states that “Dombey and Son is the closest Dickens ever came to writing a feminist novel.” Why? Because the focus of the novel is on what happens when Dombey has a daughter instead of the desired son. Mrs. Dombey dies shortly after giving birth to her second child, a long-awaited son. The eldest Dombey child was a girl and Mr. Dombey didn’t see much use in daughters: But what was a girl to Dombey and Son! In the capital of the House’s name and dignity, such a child was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested–a bad Boy–nothing more. In the eyes of Mr. Dombey, marriage wasn’t about romance.

It was more like a business arrangement. It was a business arrangement that at its best might produce the finest product of all, a son. Mr. Dombey would have reasoned: That a matrimonial alliance with himself must, in the nature of things, be gratifying and honourable to any woman of common sense. That the hope of giving birth to a new partner in such a house, could not fail to awaken a glorious and stirring ambition in the breast of the least ambitious of her sex. Throughout the novel Florence represents the virtues of love, understanding and tenderness. While Mr. Dombey represents business and logic. At the end of the novel Mr. Dombey finally turns to the love and affection that his daughter has been offering him all along. “And so Dombey and Son, as I observed upon a certain sad occasion,” said Miss Tox, winding up a host of recollections, “is indeed a daughter, Polly, after all.” The Beginning of Public Readings While Dickens was in Lausanne he gave a reading of the first installment of Dombey to some of his friends.

It went so well that the later wrote to his friend John Forster, “a great deal of money might possibly be made (if it were not infra dig) by one’s having Readings of one’s own books.” This germ of an idea became Dickens’ public readings. In 1853 Dickens gave the first public reading of one of his works. He read A Christmas Carol for a charity event. The readings were a combination of oratory and passionate acting. They were very popular. In 1858 he began giving professional readings and continued to do so throughout his life. Dickens was an electrifying performer. One of his most popular performances was Sikes and Nancy from Oliver Twist. It was an exceptionally dramatic selection in which Dickens acted out Nancy’s murder. When Dickens was performing he threw himself into the characters heart and soul. So much so that the performances began to endanger his health. In 1869 his doctor advised him against giving further readings. The strain to his system was too great. Dickens arranged a farewell tour and gave his last reading in March of 1870. It is thought that the effects of the readings was one of the factors leading to his death.

Mems Dombey and Son is the earliest novel of Dickens for which a complete set of working notes survives. Dickens called these notes “mems” witch is short for memoranda. The mems allowed him to keep track of complicated plot lines and the many characters that populate his novels. These working notes for Dombey and Son reveal that young Paul Dombey was doomed to die from the first moment that Dickens created him. Although he did live for one chapter longer than Dickens originally intended. Walter Gay was originally intended to go bad was saved from that fate. Edith, the second Mrs. Dombey, was bound for adultery and death, but Dickens spared her character at the urgings of his friend Lord Jeffrey. Information About Dombey and Son Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. Search eText, Read Online, Study, Discuss. Introduction In Dickens's literary life Dombey and Son represents a break so important as to necessitate our casting back to a summary and a generalisation. In order fully to understand what this break is, we must say something of the previous character of Dickens's novels, and even something of the general character of novels in themselves. How essential this is we shall see shortly.

It must first be remembered that the novel is the most typical of modern forms. It is typical of modern forms especially in this, that it is essentially formless. All the ancient modes or structures of literature were definite and severe. Any one composing them had to abide by their rules; they were what their name implied. Thus a tragedy might be a bad tragedy, but it was always a tragedy. Thus an epic might be a bad epic, but it was always an epic. Now in the sense in which there is such a thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel. We call any long fictitious narrative in prose a novel, just as we call any short piece of prose without any narrative an essay. Both these forms are really quite formless, and both of them are really quite new. The difference between a good epic by Mr. John Milton and a bad epic by Mr. John Smith was simply the difference between the same thing done well and the same thing done badly. But it was not (for instance) like the difference between Clarissa Harlowe and The Time Machine. If we class Richardson's book with Mr.

Wells's book it is really only for convenience; if we say that they are both novels we shall certainly be puzzled in that case to say what on earth a novel is. But the note of our age, both for good and evil, is a highly poetical and largely illogical faith in liberty. Liberty is not a negation or a piece of nonsense, as the cheap reactionaries say; it is a belief in variety and growth. But it is a purely poetic and even a merely romantic belief. The nineteenth century was an age of romance as certainly as the Middle Ages was an age of reason. Mediï¿½vals liked to have everything defined and defensible; the modern world prefers to run some risks for the sake of spontaneity and diversity. Consequently the modern world is full of a phenomenon peculiar to itself -- I mean the spectacle of small or originally small things swollen to enormous size and power. The modern world is like a world in which toadstools should be as big as trees, and insects should walk about in the sun as large as elephants. Thus, for instance, the shopkeeper, almost an unimportant figure in carefully ordered states, has in our time become the millionaire, and has more power than ten kings.

Thus again a practical knowledge of nature, of the habits of animals or the properties of fire and water, was in the old ordered state either an almost servile labour or a sort of joke; it was left to old women and gamekeepers and boys who went birds'-nesting. In our time this commonplace daily knowledge has swollen into the enormous miracle of physical size, weighing the stars and talking under the sea. In short, our age is a sort of splendid jungle in which some of the most towering weeds and blossoms have come from the smallest seed. And this is, generally speaking, the explanation of the novel. The novel is not so much the filling up of an artistic plan, however new or fantastic. It is a thing that has grown from some germ of suggestion, and has often turned out much larger than the author intended. And this, lastly, is the final result of these facts, that the critic can generally trace in a novel what was the original artistic type or shape of thought from which the whole matter started, and he will generally find that this is different in every case. In one novel he will find that the first impulse is a character.

In another novel he will find that the first impulse is a landscape, the atmosphere of some special countryside. In another novel he will find that the first impulse is the last chapter. Or it may be a thrust with sword or dagger, it may be a theology, it may be a song. Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written. Some of our enterprising editors who set their readers to hunt for banknotes and missing ladies might start a competition for finding those words in every novel. But whether or no this is possible, there is no doubt that the principle in question is of great importance in the case of Dickens, and especially in the case of Dombey and Son. In all the Dickens novels can be seen, so to speak, the original thing that they were before they were novels. The same may be observed, for the matter of that, in the great novels of most of the great modern novelists. For example, Sir Walter Scott wrote poetical romances before he wrote prose romances. Hence it follows that, with all their much greater merit, his novels may still be described as poetical romances in prose.

While adding a new and powerful element of popular humours and observation, Scott still retains a certain purely poetical right -- a right to make his heroes and outlaws and great kings speak at the great moments with a rhetoric so rhythmical that it partakes of the nature of song, the same quite metrical rhetoric which is used in the metrical speeches of Marmion or Roderick Dhu. In the same way, although Don Quixote is a modern novel in its irony and subtlety, we can see that it comes from the old long romances of chivalry. In the same way, although Clarissa is a modern novel in its intimacy and actuality, we can see that it comes from the old polite letter-writing and polite essays of the period of the Spectator. Any one can see that Scott formed in The Lay of the Last Minstrel the style that he applied again and again afterwards, like the reappearances of a star taking leave of the stage. All his other romances were positively last appearances of the positively last Minstrel.

Any one can see that Thackeray formed in fragmentary satires like The Book of Snobs or The Yellowplush Papers the style, the rather fragmentary style, in which he was to write Vanity Fair. In most modern cases, in short (until very lately, at any rate), the novel is an enormous outgrowth from something that was not a novel. And in Dickens this is very important. All his novels are outgrowths of the original notion of taking notes, splendid and inspired notes, of what happens in the street. Those in the modern world who cannot reconcile themselves to his method -- those who feel that there is about his books something intolerably clumsy or superficial -- have either no natural taste for strong literature at all, or else have fallen into their error by too persistently regarding Dickens as a modern novelist and expecting all his books to be modern novels. Dickens did not know at what exact point he really turned into a novelist. Nor do we. Dickens did not know, in his deepest soul, whether he ever really did turn into a novelist. Nor do we. The novel being a modern product is one of the few things to which we really can apply that disgusting method of thought -- the method of evolution.

But even in evolution there are great gaps, there are great breaks, there are great crises. I have said that the first of these breaks in Dickens may be placed at the point when he wrote Nicholas Nickleby. This was his first serious decision to be a novelist in any sense at all, to be anything except a maker of momentary farces. The second break, and that a far more important break, is in Dombey and Son. This marks his final resolution to be a novelist and nothing else, to be a serious constructor of fiction in the serious sense. Before Dombey and Son even his pathos had been really frivolous. After Dombey and Son even his absurdity was intentional and grave. In case this transition is not understood, one or two tests may be taken at random. The episodes in Dombey and Son, the episodes in David Copperfield, which came after it, are no longer episodes merely stuck into the middle of the story without any connection with it, like most of the episodes in Nicholas Nickleby, or most of the episodes even in Martin Chuzzlewit.

Take, for instance, by way of a mere coincidence, the fact that three schools for boys are described successively in Nicholas Nickleby, in Dombey and Son, and in David Copperfield. But the difference is enormous. Dotheboys Hall does not exist to tell us anything about Nicholas Nickleby. Rather Nicholas Nickleby exists entirely in order to tell us about Dotheboys Hall. It does not in any way affect his history or psychology; he enters Mr. Squeers's school and leaves Mr. Squeers's school with the same character, or rather absence of character. It is a mere episode, existing for itself. But when little Paul Dombey goes to an old-fashioned but kindly school, it is in a very different sense and for a very different reason from that for which Nicholas Nickleby goes to an old-fashioned and cruel school. The sending of little Paul to Dr. Blimber's is a real part of the history of little Paul, such as it is. Dickens deliberately invents all that elderly pedantry in order to show up Paul's childishness. Dickens deliberately invents all that rather heavy kindness in order to show up Paul's predestination and tragedy.

Dotheboys Hall is not meant to show up anything except Dotheboys Hall. But although Dickens doubtless enjoyed Dr. Blimber quite as much as Mr. Squeers, it remains true that Dr. Blimber is really a very good foil to Paul; whereas Squeers is not a foil to Nicholas; Nicholas is merely a lame excuse for Squeers. The change can be seen continued in the school, or rather the two schools, to which David Copperfield goes. The whole idea of David Copperfield's life is that he had the dregs of life before the wine of it. He knew the worst of the world before he knew the best of it. His childhood at Dr. Strong's is a second childhood. Now for this purpose the two schools are perfectly well adapted. Mr. Creakle's school is not only, like Mr. Squeers's school, a bad school, it is a bad influence upon David Copperfield. Dr. Strong's school is not only a good school, it is a good influence upon David Copperfield. I have taken this case of the schools as a case casual but concrete.

The same, however, can be seen in any of the groups or incidents of the novels on both sides of the boundary. Mr. Crummles's theatrical company is only a society that Nicholas happens to fall into. America is only a place to which Martin Chuzzlewit happens to go. These things are isolated sketches, and nothing else. Even Todgers's boarding-house is only a place where Mr. Pecksniff can be delightfully hypocritical. It is not a place which throws any new light on Mr. Pecksniff's hypocrisy. But the case is different with that more subtle hypocrite in Dombey and Son -- I mean Major Bagstock. Dickens does mean it as a deliberate light on Mr. Dombey's character that he basks with a fatuous calm in the blazing sun of Major Bagstock's tropical and offensive flattery. Here, then, is the essence of the change. He not only wishes to write a novel; this he did as early as Nicholas Nickleby. He wishes to have as little as possible in the novel that does not really assist it as a novel. Previously he had asked with the assistance of what incidents could his hero wander farther and farther from the pathway.

Now he has really begun to ask with the assistance of what incidents his hero can get nearer and nearer to the goal. The change made Dickens a greater novelist. I am not sure that it made him a greater man. One good character by Dickens requires all eternity to stretch its legs in; and the characters in his later books are always being tripped up by some tiresome nonsense about the story. For instance, in Dombey and Son, Mrs. Skewton is really very funny. But nobody with a love of the real smell of Dickens would compare her for a moment, for instance, with Mrs. Nickleby. And the reason of Mrs. Skewton's inferiority is simply this, that she has something to do in the plot; she has to entrap or assist to entrap Mr. Dombey into marrying Edith. Mrs. Nickleby, on the other hand, has nothing at all to do in the story, except to get in everybody's way. The consequence is that we complain not of her for getting in everyone's way, but of everyone for getting in hers. What are suns and stars, what are times and seasons, what is the mere universe, that it should presume to interrupt Mrs.

Nickleby? Mrs. Skewton (though supposed, of course, to be a much viler sort of woman) has something of the same quality of splendid and startling irrelevancy. In her also there is the same feeling of wild threads hung from world to world like the webs of gigantic spiders; of things connected that seem to have no connection save by this one adventurous filament of frail and daring folly. Nothing could be better than Mrs. Skewton when she finds herself, after convolutions of speech, somehow on the subject of Henry VIII., and pauses to mention with approval "his dear little peepy eyes and his benevolent chin." Nothing could be better than her attempt at Mahomedan resignation when she feels almost inclined to say "that there is no What's-his-name but Thingummy, and What-you-may-call-it is his prophet!" But she has not so much time as Mrs. Nickleby to say these good things; also she has not sufficient human virtue to say them constantly. She is always intent upon her worldly plans, among other things upon the worldly plan of assisting Charles Dickens to get a story finished.

She is always "advancing her shrivelled ear" to listen to what Dombey is saying to Edith. Worldliness is the most solemn thing in the world; it is far more solemn than other-worldliness. Mrs. Nickleby can afford to ramble as a child does in a field, or as a child does to laugh at nothing, for she is like a child, innocent. It is only the good who can afford to be frivolous. Broadly speaking, what is said here of Mrs. Skewton applies to the great part of Dombey and Son, even to the comic part of it. It shows an advance in art and unity; it does not show an advance in genius and creation. In some cases, in fact, I cannot help feeling that it shows a falling off. It may be a personal idiosyncrasy, but there is only one comic character really prominent in Dickens, upon whom Dickens has really lavished the wealth of his invention, and who does not. amuse me at all, and that character is Captain Cuttle. But three great exceptions must be made to any such disparagement of Dombey and Son.

They are all three of that royal order in Dickens's creation which can no more be described or criticised than strong wine. The first is Major Bagstock, the second is Cousin Feenix, the third is Toots. In Bagstock Dickens has blasted for ever that type which pretends to be sincere by the simple operation of being explosively obvious. He tells about a quarter of the truth, and then poses as truthful because a quarter of the truth is much simpler than the whole of it. He is the kind of man who goes about with posers for Bishops or for Socialists, with plain questions to which he wants a plain answer. His questions are plain only in the same sense that he himself is plain -- in the sense of being uncommonly ugly. He is the man who always bursts with satisfaction because he can call a spade a spade, as if there were any kind of logical or philosophical use in merely saying the same word twice over. He is the man who wants things down in black and white, as if black and white were the only two colours; as if blue and green and red and gold were not facts of the universe. He is too selfish to tell the truth and too impatient even to hear it.

He cannot endure the truth, because it is subtle. This man is almost always like Bagstock -- a sycophant and a toad-eater. A man is not any the less a toad-eater because he eats his toads with a huge appetite and gobbles them up, as Bagstock did his breakfast, with the eyes starting out of his purple face. He flatters brutally. He cringes with a swagger. And men of the world like Dombey are always taken in by him, because men of the world are probably the simplest of all the children of Adam. Cousin Feenix again is an exquisite suggestion, with his rickety chivalry and rambling compliments. It was about the period of Dombey and Son that Dickens began to be taken up by good society. (One can use only vulgar terms for an essentially vulgar process.) And his sketches of the man of good family in the books of this period show that he had had glimpses of what that singular world is like. The aristocrats in his earliest books are simply dragons and griffins for his heroes to fight with -- monsters like Sir Mulberry Hawk or Lord Verisopht.

They are merely created upon the old principle, that your scoundrel must be polite and powerful -- a very sound principle. The villain must be not only a villain, but a tyrant. The giant must be larger than Jack. But in the books of the Dombey period we have many shrewd glimpses of the queer realities of English aristocracy. Of these Cousin Feenix is one of the best. Cousin Feenix is a much better sketch of the essentially decent and chivalrous aristocrat than Sir Leicester Dedlock. Both of the men are, if you will, fools, as both are honourable gentlemen. But if one may attempt a classification among fools, Sir Leicester Dedlock is a stupid fool, while Cousin Feenix is a silly fool -- which is much better. The difference is that the silly fool has a folly which is, always on the borderland of wit, and even of wisdom; his wandering wits come often upon undiscovered truths. The stupid fool is as consistent and as homogeneous as wood; he is as invincible as the ancestral darkness.

Cousin Feenix is a good sketch of the sort of well-bred old ass Dombey and Son Characters - eNotes.com Dombey and Son Characters link Link Paul Dombey Paul Dombey, a London merchant, referred to as Mr. Dombey throughout the novel. Twenty successful years in the firm of Dombey and Son have brought wealth to the stern and pompous Mr. Dombey. Ten years of marriage finally bring a son and happiness (despite his wife’s death) to the unemotional, dignified, glossy businessman, for the son will occupy his rightful place in the firm. Jealous and possessive, Mr. Dombey resents his son’s affection for Florence, the older Dombey daughter. Later he sends Walter Gay, a young clerk attentive to the daughter, on an extended trip to the West Indies, and he loses his second wife because he approaches personal relationships as if they were business transactions in his office. Through reversals in both personal and business affairs, Mr. Dombey senses that his shortcomings lie in what he has always considered his strength: a belief in his indomitability.

This realization results in a modicum of happiness for him as he accepts his daughter’s love after spurning her all her life. Paul Dombey Paul Dombey, his son and heir, who is the essence of Dombey’s life. Before the child was born, Mr. Dombey had yearned for a son; during Paul’s life, he is jealous of his attentions to others, over-solicitous for his health, and unrealistic in treating the child as his longed-for business partner. After Paul’s death at the age of six, Mr. Dombey in his disillusionment considers the death a personal injustice to himself. Paul, a weak, precocious child, is uncommonly preoccupied with death, an interest that seems, in the Dickensian manner, to portend his early demise. Florence Dombey Florence Dombey, six years older than Paul. Until she is grown, Florence bears the brunt of her father’s unreasonable animosity. Courageous and compassionate, she withstands her father’s affronts and ill-temper. Of strong faith, she does not despair at failures or rebuffs. Devoted and appreciative of love, she is a good wife to Walter Gay.

Ultimately, Florence’s altruism comes full circle when she has a son, Paul, who aids in her father’s realization of his daughter’s longstanding love. Walter Gay Walter Gay, her childhood friend and later her husband. The model of good upbringing and training, he is instrumental in her safety and well-being. The last instance of his protectorship is as her husband and father of their children, when the Gays return to London to save Dombey from self-destruction and to give him renewed interest in life when he sees his grandchildren in the light in which he should have viewed his own daughter and son. Mrs. Fanny Dombey Mrs. Fanny Dombey, Mr. Dombey’s first wife, the mother of Florence and Paul. Mrs. Edith Granger Mrs. Edith Granger, Dombey’s second wife and his female counterpart in stubbornness and pride. Thwarted in her role as wife, she strikes back by pretending to elope with James Carker, Dombey’s head clerk. Her wounded pride continues through the years; she finally declares her innocence of an affair with Carker, but she refuses to see Dombey to ask his forgiveness.

James Carker James Carker, Dombey’s trusted head clerk and manager, whose villainy brings about his employer’s professional and personal ruin. Deserted by Mrs. Dombey in the hour of their elopement, he is killed by a train while trying to avoid a meeting with Dombey. Solomon Gills Solomon Gills, a maker of nautical instruments and Walter Gay’s uncle. With his loyal friend and partner, Captain Cuttle, he produces instruments that make his name a byword in safe navigation. ... David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page - Dombey and Son Dombey and Son FAQ & Email The Toodles represent a Cratchit-like poor, loving family. Polly is hired by Paul Dombey to nurse his newborn son, Paul Jr after his wife dies in childbirth. Her husband, a stoker and later an engine-driver on the railroad, echos Dickens sentiments in this exchange with the proud Mr Dombey: 'You have a son, I believe?' said Mr Dombey. 'Four on 'em, Sir. Four hims and a her. All alive!' 'Why, it's as much as you can afford to keep them!' said Mr Dombey.

'I could hardly afford but one thing in the world less, Sir.' 'What is that?' Leamington Spa After the death of his son, Paul Dombey goes to recuperate at Leamington Spa with his friend Joe Bagstock. The Royal Pump Room and Baths, where Dombey and Bagstock would have visited, opened in 1814 and were available to the well-to-do, the restorative waters were said to cure a variety of afflictions. The Coming of the Railroad During the time Dombey and Son was being serialized London was buzzing with the development of the railroad and this theme looms large throughout the novel. Read this excerpt from from chapter 6 of Dombey and Son where Dickens describes the coming of the railroad to Camden Town, a suburb in the north of London. Dickens' life during the serialization of Dombey and Son Oct 1846 - Apr 1848 The Battle of Life , his Christmas book for 1846, published.

April 1847 Son Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens born July 1847 Directing and acting in amateur theatricals throughout England and Scotland with a group of friends including George Cruikshank, John Leech, Mark Lemon, Augustus Egg, and George Henry Lewes. The group continued the theatricals through the publication of Dombey and Son and beyond. November 1847 Working with friend and philanthropist Angela Burdette Coutts opens Urania Cottage, a home for 'fallen' women. December 1847 Wife Catherine , six months pregnant, suffers a miscarriage in a railway car between Edinburgh and Glasgow. April 1848 | Illustrations | Locations Dickens' seventh novel, illustrated by Phiz , was the first with his new publishers, Bradbury and Evans . Dickens worried about his new publisher's abilities to sell his work but the new novel's monthly installments were soon selling at up to 40,000 copies a month. William Thackeray , whose monthly installments of Vanity Fair were being sold by Bradbury and Evans during this same time, was selling at best only 5000 copies a month.

In Dombey and Son, considered Dickens first artistically mature work, he began using notes he called "mems" to outline how the novel would progress. It was after Dombey and Son was published that Dickens' reputation as a world class author was established. Plot (contains spoilers) The novel tells the story of Paul Dombey, powerful head of the House of Dombey. He wants a son and when a daughter (Florence) is born he despises her. His second child, a son (Paul), is weak and sickly and dies a child. Paul's first wife dies with the birth of Paul Jr and he remarries. His second wife, Edith, does not love him and eventually runs away with Carker, a manager at the firm. With Carker gone, Paul is incapable of managing the business and it fails. In the end Paul is reconciled with his daughter, living with her family, and doting on his grandchildren. Mingled with this central thread is the story of Walter Gay and his uncle Solomon Gills, owner of the Wooden Midshipman, a nautical instruments shop. Walter Gay goes to work for the firm of Dombey and Son.

When Florence is lost in the London streets and captured by Good Mrs Brown, who steals her clothes, she is rescued by Walter. Walter and Florence become friends, which causes Mr Dombey uneasiness, as he loathes his daughter. When a position in the firm opens in Barbados, Dombey sees an opportunity to get rid of Walter and sends him. Walter's ship is lost and all hands are feared drowned. Solomon Gills goes in search of Walter, leaving the Wooden Midshipman to his friend Captain Ned Cuttle. After the breakup of her home, Florence leaves and is taken in by Captain Cuttle. Walter has survived the shipwreck and returns home. Walter and Florence are to be married, on the eve of their wedding day Solomon Gills returns home after wandering the earth looking for Walter. After the wedding Walter and Florence go to sea for a year. On the day of their return Florence is reconciled to her father. Solomon Gills produces the last bottle of the old Madeira he has been saving for just such an occasion, and all drink to Walter and Florence.

Characters: Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens | PenguinRandomHouse.com Add to Cart About Dombey and Son Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens’s story of a powerful man whose callous neglect of his family triggers his professional and personal downfall, showcases the author’s gift for vivid characterization and unfailingly realistic description. As Jonathan Lethem contends in his Introduction, Dickens’s “genius . . . is at one with the genius of the form of the novel itself: Dickens willed into existence the most capacious and elastic and versatile kind of novel that could be, one big enough for his vast sentimental yearnings and for every impulse and fear and hesitation in him that countervailed those yearnings too. Never parsimonious and frequently contradictory, he always gives us everything he can, everything he’s planned to give, and then more.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic was set from the 1867 “Charles Dickens” edition. About Dombey and Son It is said that all England mourned the heartbreaking fate of little Paul Dombey, but it is the ordeal of his loving and long-suffering sister, Florence, that carries the full emotional weight of the story.

Their father’s cold obsession with the future of his business empire, the malevolent plotting of his greedy manager, Mr. Carker, and the tragic self-contempt of his proud second wife, Edith, cast a dark shadow over the life of the motherless girl. But as the world of Dombey and Son begins to fall to pieces, Florence is sustained by the warmth and brightness of humbler allies: her fiercely loyal nurse, Susan Nipper; her haplessly devoted suitor, Toots; the rough but loveable old salt Captain Cuttle and his friend Sol Gills; and her fervent admirer, the orphan Walter Gay. In its locomotive power and its transcendent moments of suspense and revelation, Dombey and Son is a superb example of Dickens’s ability to combine the qualities of a social historian, a theatrical artist, and a poet of the utmost tenderness and insight. Charles Dickens set this tale of a hard-hearted businessman, the son he pins all his hopes on, and the daughter he cruelly neglects in a country undergoing the storms of change brought by the Industrial Revolution. This edition reprints the original Everyman’s introduction by G.K. Chesterton and includes forty illustrations by Phiz.

About Dombey and Son Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens’s story of a powerful man whose callous neglect of his family triggers his professional and personal downfall, showcases the author’s gift for vivid characterization and unfailingly realistic description. As Jonathan Lethem contends in his Introduction, Dickens’s “genius . . . is at one with the genius of the form of the novel itself: Dickens willed into existence the most capacious and elastic and versatile kind of novel that could be, one big enough for his vast sentimental yearnings and for every impulse and fear and hesitation in him that countervailed those yearnings too. Never parsimonious and frequently contradictory, he always gives us everything he can, everything he’s planned to give, and then more.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic was set from the 1867 “Charles Dickens” edition. Get the news you want from Penguin Random House Praise “There’s no writing against such power as this—one has no chance.”—William Makepeace Thackeray About Charles Dickens Charles Dickens was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812.

The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. At age eleven, Dickens was taken out of… More about Charles Dickens About Charles Dickens Charles Dickens was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. At age eleven, Dickens was taken out of… More about Charles Dickens About Charles Dickens Charles Dickens was born in a little house in Landport, Portsea, England, on February 7, 1812. The second of eight children, he grew up in a family frequently beset by financial insecurity. At age eleven, Dickens was taken out of… More about Charles Dickens Product Details Counting Down Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 9: Dombey and Son | TIME.com Follow @TIMECulture I cried when Paul Dombey died, but I wasn’t the only one.

When the fifth installment of Dombey and Son was published in 1847 — the chapter in which the fragile young heir to the great Dombey import-export firm breathes his last — the entire nation of England was apparently prostrated by grief. William Thackeray, who was in the middle of serializing his novel Vanity Fair, was prostrated by envy. His verdict: “There’s no writing against such power as this — one has no chance!” Paul Dombey had no chance either. He’s sickly from infancy; the “and Son” in the title has the ring of a premature epitaph. But unlike the innocent Oliver Twist , Paul is a wise child, with a philosophical air that lifts him preternaturally out of his small body. He dies about a quarter of the way into the book, but you feel as if he’s worked through enough existential questions for a lifetime. Then you wonder: What’s the next three-quarters of this book going to be about? (READ: Counting Down Dickens’ Greatest Novels. Number 10: Oliver Twist ) It is mostly about unrequited filial love, which may be even sadder than unrequited romantic love. Mr.

Dombey — we are not on a first-name basis — dotes on Paul to the exclusion of his older daughter, Florence. Florence dotes on her father, but she is a girl, and thus useless to the firm; once Paul dies she only reminds her father of his lost son, and he loathes the sight of her. She is devastated by this aversion for most of her life. It’s not that she hasn’t known affection; it just hasn’t done her much good. Paul and Florence adored each other, but that ends with his tombstone. A poor boy named Walter, a sort of gofer at Dombey and Son, is infatuated with Florence, but his attachment to her is inappropriate and he is sent off to sea. The second wife Mr. Dombey takes, who quickly learns to loathe him, loves Florence, but Mr. Dombey gets jealous of his wife’s attention and forbids the two to communicate. The wife’s name is Edith Granger. I had not read Dombey and Son until this fall, and I was not prepared for the venom of this marriage. Most of Dickens’ unhappy women suffer in silence or otherwise stoic passivity.

In this case, you can practically hear her spitting at him. Their union is a callous transaction: she marries him for money; he marries her hoping for another male heir. And I have to give Dickens credit: He sets Edith up as a classic evil stepmother, but instead, she reaches out to lonely, neglected Florence, and the two of them are happy in each other’s company, for a little while at least. Dickens said of Dombey and Son, at the time that it was published, that he thought it would be remembered as one of his best works. It was only his seventh novel, and he was underestimating himself. Still, there are two transformative forces in Dombey that give it a visceral power. One of these forces is Edith, who stands in for all passionate women bridled by expectation and duty. You could lock her in an oppressively upholstered room with her better-known 19th-century sisters, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth and James’ Isabel Archer and watch them all try (some successfully, some not) to break free.

Edith’s liberation strategy may not be quite rational, but she’s definitely a trailblazer. The other trailblazer is the railroad, which claims the house and the head of anyone in its path. There are two train scenes in Dombey and Son that alone make the book worth reading. The first shows Mr. Dombey after Paul’s death, traveling to the resort town where he will court Edith: He found no pleasure or relief in the journey. Tortured by these thoughts he carried monotony with him, through the rushing landscape, and hurried headlong, not through a rich and varied country, but a wilderness of blighted plans and gnawing jealousies. The very speed at which the train was whirled along mocked the swift course of the young life that had been borne away so steadily and so inexorably to its fore-doomed end. The power that forced itself upon its iron way — its own — defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages, and degrees behind it, was a type of the triumphant monster, Death.

You can feel the tension between the human scale of existence and the mechanical scale, the ebb of the former and the onrush of the latter. The first commercial rail line in England began operating in 1830; it represented speed, connection and most of all mobility, but it dealt out noise, dirt and destruction in its wake. And as with other points of “progress” in the Victorian Era — like the Reform Bill, which aimed to expand the electorate — it was hotly debated, both in fact and in fiction. A resident of Middlemarch, the provincial town of Eliot’s epic novel, puts the objection beautifully: “Some say this country’s seen its best days, and the sign is, as it’s being overrun with these fellows trampling right and left, and wanting to cut it up into railways; and for all the big traffic to swallow up the little, so as there shan’t be a team left on the land, nor a whip to crack.” Dickens taps into the profound inhumanity of this human convenience, the disorienting nature of rapid change via rapid transit.

Entrepreneur though he was, he was also deeply conservative and sentimental, and in his mind the railway could be as dangerous an invention as the guillotine. Thackeray, by the way, was right to be jealous of Dombey and Son. It sold far better in serial than Vanity Fair — some 34,000 copies per month to Vanity Fair’s 5,000. From the 21st century perspective, Vanity Fair is a better book, with an arch, ironic narrative voice that’s well suited to the modern sensibility. If you haven’t read it, take a look. But bear in mind that its archness makes it a little bit unlovable, at least in terms of emotional attachment. It won’t make you cry. For that, try the deathbed of little Paul Dombey. Come back tomorrow for our look at Charles Dickens’ eighth best novel — Hard Times. READ: The Previous Entry in This Series— Number 10: Oliver Twist Subscribe Popular Among Subscribers

Question: In the Dickens novel 'Dombey and Son' what is the name of the son?
Answer: PAUL